Widening the Circle of Human Despair
When it's not tragic enough that a loved one's been murdered
One of the things that deeply saddens me about the death penalty is how it reels in perfectly innocent folks to a place of complicity and darkness that probably (but not necessarily) diverts them from their path of healing after a loved one has been murdered.
I’m referring to the way prosecutors recruit the families of murder victims to co-sign the death warrant for a killer. By and large, until the murder of their own loved one, these were people who went about their day not engaged in thought experiments that explore who should be killed, who should be skinned alive, and who should receive some form of mercy.
I’m not here to persuade anyone about anything. I just want to share what I’ve been feeling while reading stories of upcoming executions.
Then, suddenly, their lives are turned upside down. Someone chose violence and that decision took away someone they loved dearly. That kind of grief is unfathomable to most people. I’ll also say that includes most prosecutors who, in capital cases, have a uniform approach of persuading these family members that offering assistance to the prosecutor’s sentencing aspirations is a valuable service.
For some people, the vengeance of responding to one murder with some roughly equivalent payback may very well be the catharsis they need to heal. My point is not to say they’re wrong for thinking that and going down that path. My concern is that they’re invited to do so - where it’s not a thought experiment. And that the many people who need to heal in a very different way are also invited - essentially coerced through shame, guilt and other manipulative arguments - to help build the prosecutor’s resume and satisfy the punitive “itch” of the government and politicians by becoming a prop in a courtroom.
Again, I can’t emphasize enough how much I equally honor the grieving process of those who feel helped by their cooperation with prosecutors as I wish the prosecutors - and lawmakers and politicians and judges and bloodthirsty galleries of gawkers - would honor the grieving process of those who really don’t need to be sucked in deeper into a dark world they never to dwell within.
There’s a material leap from imagining or fantasizing about a cruel, painful punishment for the killer, on the one hand, and then going all the way over to where those thoughts are elicited and exploited and relied upon to help carry out the actual slaying of that killer.
When I read the comments of family members in the press or in sentencing hearings - none of which I’ll specifically call out here as I have no way of sorting which statements are causing more harm - I feel a profound sadness. I feel empathy for the loss. I feel distress over the way the case must haunt them - and all the “what if” scenarios that would consume my own thoughts without relent. But the big regret I have is how these family members are publicly sharing their thirst for blood at the bidding of prosecutors and lawmakers whose thirst for blood they’re drawn into embracing.
It’s these knock-on casualties of the original murders - the slow, torturous detour from a grieving process that puts the family members first - that are lamentable because they’re avoidable. We’re wrecking these other human lives because the state craves justice on its narrowly-prescribed terms.
It wasn’t good enough for the murder to claim the one life. The death penalty takes the murder victim’s family members, already casualties of the murder, and fixed a path for them that leads to their complicity in a revenge killing.
If the death penalty isn’t an option, a family member may very well testify at sentencing something along the lines of “a life sentence doesn’t feel right to me and I will not rest until the killer is dead.” They may wish for all sorts of brutal outcomes for the killer. They might say, “If it was up to me, he’d be fried.”
I do not judge anyone who feels so strongly about the way a loved one was killed and taken from their loves. I don’t judge them for testifying this way in a death penalty case, either.
I just feel horrible for them - and outraged by the district attorneys, solicitors, and prosecutors who invite them to participate in a death penalty process where their testimony will make them complicit in an actual killing.
There’s a material leap from imagining or fantasizing about a cruel, painful punishment for the killer, on the one hand, and then going all the way over to where those thoughts are elicited and exploited and relied upon to help carry out the actual slaying of that killer. This isn’t a thought experiment. These family members are recruited and even groomed into being accomplices in a real living person’s death.
Why do we give public servants the encouragement to really screw over and bake in the trauma of the family members by getting them to personally partake in the murder game that’s cost them so dearly already?
It’s profoundly sad for me to hear people who themselves were leading lives rightfully inattentive to death-mongering, being thrown into a despairing situation which routinely means that they’re going to be pressured and, with no regard at all for their own mental health, steered into helping the government execute a human.
I just don’t think it’s helpful or healing or respectful to do this to perfectly innocent people - no matter whose career it may advance or which politicians get their rocks off by primitive and clunky-government-issue approaches to justice in the wake of a killing.
The murderer has a hand in all of this, but why do we give public servants the latitude - or, really, the encouragement - to really screw over and bake in the trauma of the family members by getting them to personally partake in the murder game that’s cost them so dearly already?
I’m not here to persuade anyone about anything. I just want to share what I’ve been feeling while reading stories of upcoming executions. For all the gore and drama of the case under direct consideration, I tend to think a lot about how I’m probably witnessing an unfolding tragedy and a further loss of humanity whenever family members are trotted out by the criminal law system to share their wishes for death - in order to have someone killed.
It just strikes me as a profound tragedy in itself when I think of the trajectory from the moment of innocence immediately before they learned their loved one was killed to the point where they’ve been coerced into becoming passionate helpers in someone else’s revenge killing.
This trajectory starts with the murder, yet the system leads the family members to one gruesome and very specific place out of the many paths that could be taken. So, as I hear these execution stories, I’m particularly mournful of how we have devised a system of laws and rules where that horrifying trajectory is routinely followed…and where it is plotted out because widening the circle of human despair is widely thought of as a path to “justice.”
Yes, yes, yes.